In general, a weather strip is made of an excellent elastic rubber material so as to perform a role of maintaining air-tightness.
The weather strip has been adapted to a motor vehicle as a body side weather strip mounted on a vehicle body panel of the motor vehicle, a door side weather strip (or referred to as a door weather strip) mounted to a door of the motor vehicle, and so on.
The door weather strip is mounted on a door panel along the entire circumference of the door so as to maintain air-tightness of a passenger compartment when the door is closed, and tightly contacts a sealing surface of the vehicle body panel that matches the door when the door is closed.
The door weather strip is formed so as to be overlapped with the vehicle body panel by a predetermined amount for improving the air-tightness performance when the door is closed.
As such, when the door is closed so that the door weather strip is overlapped with the vehicle body panel, the door weather strip is elastically deformed from the original shape thereof and then tightly contacts the sealing surface of the vehicle body panel by an elastic repulsive force against the shape deformation thereof, thereby appropriately maintaining air-tightness of the inside of the passenger compartment room even while the motor vehicle is driven.
FIG. 1 shows a cross-sectional view in which a door weather strip according to the conventional art is mounted to a door panel. The door weather strip 10 includes a base portion 12 fixedly attached to a door panel 20, and a sealing portion 14 formed to integrally extend from the base portion 12 so as to be able to be elastically deformed.
The sealing portion 14 is formed to have a larger width than a width of a gap between the door panel 20 and a vehicle body panel 30 when a door is closed, whereby the sealing portion 14 is pressurized by the vehicle body panel 30 and is elastically deformed so as to block and seal the gap.
When the door is closed, however, an end portion 14a of the sealing portion 14 contacts a sealing surface 32 of the vehicle body panel 30. In this state, as the closing motion of the door continuously progresses, an end surface of the sealing portion 14 including the end portion 14a is moved while being pressurized by and tightly contacting the sealing surface 32 of the vehicle body panel 30.
If the end surface of the sealing portion 14 tightly contacting the sealing surface 32 of the vehicle body panel 30 is moved along the sealing surface 32 of the vehicle body panel 30, the sealing portion 14 is quickly abraded by the repeated opening and closing process of the door so that air-tightness performance thereof is deteriorated. Furthermore, abnormal noise is generated when the sealing portion 14 of the door weather strip rubs the vehicle body panel 30, whereby the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) performance of the motor vehicle is deteriorated.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the inventive concept and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art.